Napoléon is a 1927 epic silent French film directed by Abel Gance that tells the story of Napoleon's early years.
On screen, the title is Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, meaning "Napoleon as seen by Abel Gance". The film is recognised as a masterwork of fluid camera motion, produced in a time when most camera shots were static. Many innovative techniques were used to make the film, including fast cutting, extensive close-ups, a wide variety of hand-held camera shots, location shooting, point of view shots, multiple-camera setups, multiple exposure, superimposition, underwater camera, kaleidoscopic images, film tinting, split screen and mosaic shots, multi-screen projection, and other visual effects.
A revival of Napoléon in the mid-1950s influenced the filmmakers of the French New Wave.
The film begins in Brienne-le-Château with youthful Napoleon attending military school where he manages a snowball fight like a military campaign, yet he suffers the insults of other boys.
It continues a decade later with scenes of the French Revolution and Napoleon's presence at the periphery as a young army lieutenant. He returns to visit his family home in Corsica but politics shift against him and put him in mortal danger. He flees, taking his family to France. Serving as an officer of artillery in the Siege of Toulon, Napoleon's genius for leadership is rewarded with a promotion to brigadier general.
Jealous revolutionaries imprison Napoleon but then the political tide turns against the Revolution's own leaders. Napoleon leaves prison, forming plans to invade Italy. He falls in love with the beautiful Joséphine de Beauharnais. The emergency government charges him with the task of protecting the National Assembly.
Succeeding in this he is promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Interior, and he marries Joséphine. He takes control of the army which protects the French–Italian border, and propels it to victory in an invasion of Italy.
Gance planned for Napoléon to be the first of six movies about Napoleon's career, a chronology of great triumph and defeat ending in Napoleon's death in exile on the island of Saint Helena. After the difficulties encountered in making the first film, Gance realised that the costs involved would make the full project impossible.
The film was first released in a gala at the Palais Garnier (then the home of the Paris Opera) on 7 April 1927. Napoléon had been screened in only eight European cities when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the rights to it, but after screening it in London, it was cut drastically in length, and only the central panel of the three-screen Polyvision sequences were retained before it was put on limited release in the US.
There, the silent masterpiece was indifferently received at a time when talkies were just starting to appear. The film was restored in 1981 after twenty years' work by silent film historian Kevin Brownlow.
Directed by Abel Gance
Produced by Abel Gance
Written by Abel Gance
Starring Albert Dieudonné, Gina Manès, Antonin Artaud, Edmond Van Daële
Carmine Coppola (1981 in the US)
Cinematography, Jules Kruger
Editing by Marguerite Beaugé (1927) ... various others at later times
Distributed by Gaumont (Europe)
Release date: 7 April 1927
Country: France
Language: Silent film with English intertitles
Running time: Various lengths DVD #1: 2hr50min50sec (edited, 1979 restored version)+ DVD #2 - recent restored version from opening to intermission.
Combined over 5+ hours.
DVD#1 - complete restored though edited - focuses on Napoleon as a young man through marriage and concluding with his conquering years ....restored approx. 1979 ... 2 hr 22 min
DVD#2 Napoleon as a boy to teen to man ...but does not include marriage. This Pt. 1 of most recent restored in his "formative" years. See below why the balance of this restored version cannot be released in USA. 2 hr 51min (Early years complete DVD, ends at Intermission)
DVD#3 - 3 hr 52 min (Complete, edited release)
KNOWN dates of restoration will be on DVD label.
The film is complete or near as complete as any historian can piece together.
3 DVDs in DVD/CD sleeves, photo label.
Guaranteed, replaced with same title.
Additional History:
Napoléon (1927) is an epic silent French film directed by Abel Gance that tells the story of the rise of Napoleon I of France.
It begins from his youth in school where he already managed a snowball fight like a military campaign, to his victory in invading Italy in 1797. Planned to be the first of six movies about Napoleon Bonaparte, it was realised after the completion of the film that the costs involved would make this impossible.
Ahead of its time in its use of handheld cameras and editing, many scenes were hand tinted or toned. Gance had intended the final reel of the film to be screened as a triptych via triple projection, or Polyvision.
It was first released in a gala premiere at the Paris Opéra in April 1927. Napoléon had been screened in only 8 European cities when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the rights to the film, but after screening it intact in London, it was cut drastically in length, and only the central panel of the widescreen sequences retained before it was put on limited release in the United States, where it was indifferently received at a time when talkies were just starting to appear.
One of the crowning achievements of the silent era, writer-director Abel Gance’s Napoléon is a monumental but unfinished masterpiece, originally intended as a series of back-to-back productions covering the whole of Napoleon’s life. Unlike his subject, Gance was unable to proceed beyond the Italian campaign of 1796, Napoleon’s first major expansionist operation, at which point the shoot ran out of money. (Napoleon’s army also didn’t have any money, but he let his troops live off the land, an expedient Gance couldn’t reproduce.)
Instead of a series of films, Gance wound up with a massive, incomplete epic, reportedly six and half hours in length originally, but slashed by American distributor MGM to less than an hour and a half for its 1929 US release. Due to this butchery — not to mention the burgeoning sound revolution — Napoléon was a stateside flop, and Gance was never able to raise the money to tell the rest of Napoleon’s story.
In subsequent decades Gance kept tinkering with the film, producing versions ranging in length from 135 minutes to 275 minutes. The original six-hour silent epic, however, was thought lost, until a 1979 restoration reconstituting approximately two-thirds of the original film, painstakingly reassembled and restored by film historian Kevin Brownlow and featuring an original score by Carl Davis. Two years later, an edited version of this restoration was released in the US by Francis Ford Coppola — who had sponsored Browslow’s work — with a new score by Carmine Coppola, Francis’ father. Premiering in Radio City Music Hall, it was subsequently released on VHS.
Since then, Brownslow has completed at least two further restorations, the latest and best, his 2000 version, runs about 5½ hours. Unfortunately, due to Coppola’s exclusive US rights, this optimal version is unavailable in the US.
Even the four-hour 1981 Coppola VHS, though, remains an impressive testament to Gance’s monumental ambitions and technical wizardry. Gance creates an aura of dynamism and mythic power around his protagonist and his times with strikingly mobile camera effects, from shots photographed on horseback or with handheld cameras to footage of the revolutionary Convention taken from an overhead swing, which makes the tumultous Convention physically heave and toss like the raging sea seen in intercut footage of Napoleon on a dinghy battling a storm.
Startling split-screen effects create a dreamlike, mythic quality about even the opening snowball fight featuring an imperious young Bonaparte (Vladimir Roudenko) at military school in Brienne. But Gance’s boldest innovation is preserved only in the climactic Italian campaign sequence, originally one of four sequences Gance shot in a technique he called "Polyvision" (the other three Polyvision sequences are lost). This was an early form of widescreen projected in triptych across three separate screens from three projectors, a technique later developed as Cinerama.
Some shots in this climactic triptych sequence are true widescreen panoramas, photographed simultaneously with three cameras and projected in more or less sychronized continuity. Others break up the screens into separate panels, often focusing on the grim visage of Napoleon (Albert Dieudonné) in the center screen. In the rousing finale, Gance tints the screens to match the blue, white, and red fields of the French Tricolor flag. It’s a robust feat of cinematic mythologizing.
This mythic quality, and the reverence with which Gance treats his subject, has unsurprisingly occasioned sharp political criticism of the film — not entirely fairly, perhaps, given his unrealized intentions of additional films portraying the later Emperor Napoleon. Still, however Gance might subsequently have nuanced his portrait, unquestionably his Napoleon is larger than life, a godlike figure whose mere presence is enough to quell rioting mobs and mutinous officers, whose words inflame populations and armies. Almost as fearsome, too, are the architects of the Reign of Terror, Robespierre (Edmond von Daele), whose striking tinted, round-lensed eyeglasses and powdered wig are somehow oddly evocative of a villain in a Matrix sequel, and Louis Saint-Just (Gance himself), dandyish and implacable.
Napoleon’s restless energy and imperious authority have their humorous sides. At his civil wedding to Josephine (Gina Manès), the impatient young general brusquely waves aside one formality after another, snapping "Skip all that!" Later, riding in a horse-drawn coach, Napoleon becomes fed up with the carriage’s pace, stops the carriage, unhitches the horses, and rides galloping off on one of them.
The imagery that surrounds Napoleon is first iconic (eagles, fire), then openly messianic, and finally, in the Italian campaign climax, a startling combination of satanic and divine, as Napoleon becomes "the tempter" showing the "promised land" of Italy to the French armies — a blending of the Devil showing Christ all the nations of the world to entice him to worship him and Yahweh leading His chosen people into Palestine.
In spite of all these worshipful over-the-top overtones, I find it impossible, at such a chronological and cultural remove from Gance, not to say Napoleon, to regard Napoléon as any kind of living political or moral document. It is an extraordinary artifact from another culture, a mythology as remarkable and as alien as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Icelandic Eddas. For students of silent film, this is one of those indispensable landmarks you must see before you die.
www.imdb.com/title/tt0018192
